Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe (review)

Frederick N. Bohrer's book culminates more than a decade of research on the reception of Ancient Near Eastern antiquities in nineteenth-century English, French, and German culture. The social and imaginative construction of the "Orient" in Western European culture justifiably persists as a theme in cultural and postcolonial studies, which developed in the wake of Edward Said's Orientalism (1979). Bohrer investigates a relatively neglected area for such inquiry: the findings of French and British excavations in Mesopotamia, particularly of ancient Assyria by the archaeologists Paul-Émile Botta and Austen Henry Layard. Sumerian, Babylonian, and Persian cultures are also addressed, though to a lesser extent. The study's central achievement is the theoretical precision with which the author explicates the subtleties of meaning and expectation in the mid-to-late nineteenth-century reception of monumental statuary and relief carvings of Nineveh and other sites.

In an effort to avoid Said's binary of Orient and Occident, Bohrer carefully theorizes an expanded notion of "exoticism," a broad category of aesthetic and social differentiation between cultures historically and/or geographically distant. One of these is necessarily "alien," and its artifacts appear exotic to, in this case, Victorian and continental European society. "Exotic artifacts," Bohrer observes, "are about themselves and the Western societies in which they circulate at least as much as any intrinsic culture they claim to represent" (16). Among the study's intricate weave of theoretical concepts, Hans Robert Jauss's notion of the horizon is called upon repeatedly as a trope for "the complex of cultural, ethical, and aesthetic expectations of readers or viewers at the historical moment of a text's or object's appearance" (24). Bohrer also draws heavily from Walter Benjamin's writings, in particular those that address the changing regard for the art object as it undergoes public circulation and transformation through reproduction.

As he constructs a hermeneutic for understanding European conceptions of Mesopotamia, Bohrer ventures further into postcolonial theory. Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity is called into service as Bohrer examines the fictionalization in the West of Assyrian artifacts and depictions (the French Romantic fictions of the potentate Sardanapalus, for instance, or William Holman Hunt's Pre-Raphaelite incorporation of Assyrian architectural detail in The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple [1860]). The object of attention becomes an image, a matter of both its discrete and collective positioning as an awkward formation that neither achieves the aesthetic ideal of the Greeks nor the distinctive symbolic presence of the Egyptians. According to Bohrer's argument, Assyria takes on an ideological condition that suggests subaltern status—a kind of poor relation in the historicized hierarchy assumed by modern Europe's valorization of the ancient Mediterranean world (219). Bohrer's adaptation of hybridity from Bhabha, and of Gayatri Spivak's subaltern thesis, is not entirely persuasive. The lesson is clear, however, that the meaning of Mesopotamian artifacts is unfixed, dispersed over an array of cultural formations, journal articles and illustrations, museum and exposition exhibits, paintings, architecture, and other productions of emergent metropolitan vintage.

Though Bohrer brings forth abundant material evidence to demonstrate how cultural enterprise in Britain, France, and Germany displayed the Ancient Near East, the importance of Bohrer's research for Victorian studies is most readily seen in his detailed analysis of the varied artistic, institutional, and popular response to the treasures unearthed at Nineveh and Nimrud. The British Museum's contentious handling of the integration of winged deities, colossal human-headed and winged bulls, and related carvings into a "corridor" of its new facility is fascinating, as is the contrast with James Fergusson's fanciful reconstruction, under Layard's direction, of the "Nineveh Court" at the Sydenham Crystal Palace. Bohrer also ascertains distinctions of social class and cultural reception from a close reading of nineteenth-century journals and analysis of their corresponding wood engravings, as well as the mass entertainments of panorama and diorama. Many scholars...